Companies commission investigators show up at NGO's door
Suaram, the Kuala Lumpur-based human rights NGO at the center of
attempts to break open a corruption case over Malaysia’s 2002 purchase
of French submarines, has been given seven days by officials of the
Companies Commission to hand over an array of documents covering its
expenditures from 2008 to 2011.

Cynthia Gabriel, director for the organization, told Asia Sentinel that
Suaram would comply although the NGO is taking advice from lawyers on
strategy.

The authorities sought to raid Suaram last week but were turned back,
once because their warrant wasn’t signed and a second time because they
arrived at the Suaram headquarters after everybody had gone home.

The visits followed several days of stories in ruling party-controlled
newspapers demanding to know why Suaram was registered as a company
rather than an NGO, and what it had done with earnings it posted since
2009 although that seemed to be a deflection against damning
documents.that showed that top government officials had been complicit
in bribe charges for two decades.

The visits by the Companies Commission investigators were characterized
as “harassment, pure and simple, as a way to distract the public from
the ongoing Scorpene probe in France,” Gabriel said. “Further to this,
we have nothing to hide. We audit our accounts yearly.”

The visits – the first in Suaram’s 23 years of existence – appear to be a
fishing expedition to try to find out where the NGO gets enough money
to hire French lawyers to pursue a government scandal, and more
particularly whether any of the money is coming from the Pakatan Rakyat
coalition headed by Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim.

The Commission’s other priorities?

In the meantime, the Companies Commission investigators have been so
busy seeking to investigate Suaram that they have neglected to
investigate two other companies – Perimekar Sdn Bhd, which somehow
became important enough to win a €114.96 million commission on the sale
of the submarines despite the fact that it did no business the year
before it won the commission, and Terasasi Hong Kong Ltd, which received
another €36 million from the French defense contractor despite the fact
it only existed as a name on a wall in a Hong Kong accounting office.

Both companies were headed by Abdul Razak Baginda, then the head of a
think tank called Malaysia Strategic Research, which was closely
connected to the United Malays National Organization. Razak Baginda was
one of then-Defense Minister Najib Tun Razak’s best friends.

Two years ago, Suaram hired a team of Paris-based lawyers headed by
William Bourdon to investigate the French defense giant DCN and its
subsidiaries on suspicion it was involved a web of corruption. The story
has been told in voluminous detail in 133 documents submitted to a
French prosecuting court. The documents describe a long tangle of
blackmail, bribery, influence peddling, misuse of corporate assets and
concealment, among other allegations. The documents, written in French,
were described in a story published in Asia Sentinel on June 25 and uploaded onto the Internet here.

Increasing fire from government blogs, papers

Suaram has come under increasing fire since Bourdon and his colleague,
Joseph Breham, began to publicize a series of allegations related to the
documents in May. Pro-government bloggers have repeatedly accused
Suaram of being in Anwar’s employ, have questioned the veracity of the
documents and whether they existed and whether French authorities in
fact are even going to move the case forward.

Questioned by the opposition in Parliament, Defense Minister Ahmad Zahid
Hamidi took the floor briefly almost at midnight on June 26 to say
Suaram was wrong to say there was a trial taking place in France’s
Tribunal de Grande Instance over the sale of the subs, although neither
Suaram nor Asia Sentinel had said a trial was taking place. There is an
investigation taking place, however, and it was those investigators who
confiscated hundreds, perhaps thousands of documents from DCN and its
subsidiaries in raids on April 7, 2010 to present to the investigating
magistrate.

Ahmad Zahid also said that the Defense Ministry had no information on
allegations confidential documents of the procurement of the submarines
were sold to Thint Asia (Thales International) by Terarasi (Hong Kong)
allegedly for €36 million although Asia Sentinel was able to obtain the
information from the documents, which are on line, and from the Hong
Kong Registry of Companies.

"The ministry also does not have any information on the alleged payment
from Thales International Asia to Terasasi (Hong Kong)," he said.

As Asia Sentinel reported, at least one secret diplomatic cable shows
that some of the misdeeds appear to have taken place with the knowledge
of top French and Malaysian government officials including then-foreign
Minister Alain Juppe and with the consent of former Malaysian Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad. The documents were presented to the French
Prosecuting Magistrate at the Court de Grand Instance de Paris in May
and June of 2011.

Harassment: Not a new tactic

It is not the first time the Malaysian government has sent investigators
after those calling attention to massive corruption on the part of the
government and its cronies. For example,
when Ramli Yusuff, the director of Malaysia's Commercial Crime
Investigation Department, sought to bring Tajudin Ramli, a crony of
former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, to justice for looting Malaysian
Airline System (MAS) of tens of millions of dollars, it was Ramli who
was pursued by the Malaysian Anti-Crime Commission rather than Tajudin
despite abundantly clear evidence of the charges. Ramli and his lawyer
came under fire that nearly ruined their careers and almost put them in
jail.

Likewise, Lim Guan Eng, now the chief minister of the state of Penang,
was arrested in 1994 after pointing out that the former chief minister
of Malacca, Rahim Thamby Chik, had been absolved of charges of statutory
rape after having had sex with an underaged girl and in fact had had
the girl arrested after her parents complained. Lim was ultimately
sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for sedition for bringing up the
charges, was disallowed from standing for election to public office for
five years and he was made ineligible to contest the 2004 Malaysian
general election.